Latino Daily News

The independent online newspaper 14ymedio, published by Cuban blogger Yoani Sanchez can now be viewed on the island after authorities had been blocking the Web site since its launching in the middle of last week.

“@14ymedio is accessible on networks at #Cuba. Hurry Web users! before the next blockade http://flic.kr/p/nrD9gL” said Sanchez on her Twitter account.

But Reinaldo Escobar, a member of the new publication’s Editorial Council and Sanchez’s husband, told Efe on Sunday that it would be better to wait until the lack of a government-imposed blockade has “lasted a while ... to know whether it’s an accident or a tactic.”

Sanchez launched 14ymedia last Wednesday and it was possible for viewers in Cuba to access the Web site for only a few hours before it was blocked and users were shunted to another site called Yoani$landia that offered articles by government-supporting bloggers and journalists containing critical references to her.

Sanchez, meanwhile, had denounced the situation on Twitter and provided interested parties with a way to access her publication by using an anonymous “proxy.”

The unblocking of the independent newspaper came hours after Granma, the official publication of the Cuban Community Party, said on Saturday that 14ymedio is part of the U.S. plans against the communist-ruled island and that its basic focus is “to nourish the disinformation and defamation campaigns against Cuba.”

“Granma is devoting itself to attacking me. Another clipping to keep for my grandchildren,” wrote Sanchez on Twitter about the article.

Sanchez launched 14ymedio last Wednesday as a new online newspaper in which she says she intends to talk about the Cuban reality with a “commitment to the truth, freedom and the defense of human rights,” and take up the challenge of reaching readers both on and outside the island.

The daily, available at www.14ymedio.com, said it is being launched in digital format “in one of the countries with the least Internet connectivity on the entire planet.”

The new online paper says that it is the fruit of the “effort of independent journalism in Cuba to counteract the monopoly of the official media” adding that “we drink from the experience of other publications born in societies that moved toward democracy and where the press played a role in the formation of the civic conscience and in the securing of freedoms.”